It's a Disaster

Sinopsis

Four couples who meet for Sunday brunch find themselves stranded in a house together as the world may be about to end. When Tracy Scott decides to introduce her new beau Glenn to her three friends Hedy, Emma, and Lexi and their significant others, her biggest fear is whether or not her friends will approve of her new relationship, little...

Detalles de producción

Sinopsis

Four couples who meet for Sunday brunch find themselves stranded in a house together as the world may be about to end. When Tracy Scott decides to introduce her new beau Glenn to her three friends Hedy, Emma, and Lexi and their significant others, her biggest fear is whether or not her friends will approve of her new relationship, little does she realize that's the least of her worries. Before long the couples find themselves in the midst of an apocalyptic disaster, catching them all off guard. One thing is clear; these four couples aren't going to let the potential end of the world get in the way of the relationship issues they all need to work out.

It's a Disaster

The apocalypse is in the air these days. Todd Berger's It's a Disaster is the first of four end-of-the-world comedies set for release this year-the others being May's Rapture-Palooza, June's This Is the End, and August's The World's End-and it sets the bar very high for those to come. A character study of eight self-centered friends who congregate for brunch, soon discover their cell phones, Internet, and TV are dead, then learn that they're in the middle of World War III, It's a Disaster starts off threatening to be an insufferable exercise in hipsterism.

Emma and Pete's marriage is on the rocks-they're hosting the brunch so as to announce their divorce-because Emma (Erinn Hayes) slept with Buck (Kevin M. Brennan) and Pete (Blaise Miller) slept with Lexi (Rachel Boston). Yes, Buck and Lexi are a couple too, and they are basically closeted swingers. All seem like clichés: Emma is an uptight suburbanite with hair carefully parted, red lipstick strategically applied, and pearls lovingly draped. Pete is a classic yuppie bordering on a midlife crisis. Buck is a stoner washout with a Hulk Hogan mustache. Lexi is a free-spirited glockenspiel player who's proud of the fact that she and Buck consummated their marriage in the bathroom of a TGI Fridays.

As for the rest of the brunch attendees, Emma and Pete's doctor friend Tracy (Julia Stiles) is a mess of neuroses, maybe because she exclusively dates crazy men, or because none of her friends believe that her boyfriends have been crazy. Her new bf, Glen (David Cross, in full Tobias Fünke mode), seems more promising: he's a fourth-grade history teacher, and the only crazy thing about him is that he's okay with shutting off the 1812 Overture right before its famous climax. At least he's not like Shane (Jeff Grace), Hedy's (America Ferrera) long-term fiancé, who shuns human interaction at the brunch in favor of obsessively bidding online on a rare Alpha Flight comic book.

So yeah, all those characters sound like clichés. On paper they most definitely are. But when brought to life by this talented ensemble, they're anything but. And once it becomes clear that their lives as they've known them are over - an unknown attacker drops dirty bombs and nerve gas on New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, and multiple other cities - then it becomes really interesting. Especially once they realize that the nerve gas will very shortly seep into Emma and Pete's house and kill them all. It's like Portlandia meets Melancholia, and it's fascinating to see how each of the characters orients himself or herself toward the prospect of imminent death.

Worry wort comic-book freak Shane leads the charge to tape up the doors and windows and try to find some way to survive, while endlessly speculating over who attacked them - the enemy couldn't have been from this world, right? - and planning to deal with the post-apocalyptic motorcycle gangs they'll surely face if they live. His completely neglected fiancée Hedy, a chemistry teacher, goes into a negative panic and starts making home-cooked Ecstasy to cope. Tracy sets up one of the best jokes of the movie by lamenting all the things she never did in her life: she never went to Europe, never went to the ballet, never fell in love, never watched The Wire. The response of Glen? ''All of those things are overrated…except for The Wire." Oh, and as for Cross's Glen? Well, you'll have to witness his unique solution for dealing with Armageddon yourself.

It's a tricky thing to mine humor from a feel-bad situation as thoroughly awful as this - Berger even shoots his movie like an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama - but whereas this summer's all-star comic extravaganza This Is the End appears to strive for raunchy belly laughs, It's a Disaster settles for a general mood of wry amusement as its characters ponder questions of their own mortality that they've probably never pondered before…and maybe still aren't. Two of the couples at least, Emma and Pet